That looks awesome. I need to find an API that provides album art as well as the artist art like Pandora does. I've been unable to find any docs about the Pandora API and going to their site doesn't work since I'm not in the USA. Once I get that then I won't use the embedded art as the background as it really does suck for that purpose.

In the pic I uploaded, the album art is used along with the artist picture could you use the embedded album art and a seperate "artist" jpeg for the background need to be able to "scrape" artists pics from somewhere.

As far as the controls go I would leave them the way they are with the song name at top and the swipe skip function you would not want to be looking for small buttons on a touchscreen.
Biggest problem with this is peoples screen resolutions differing. I personally have a 1280x800 screen but other may only have 800x600 so need some way of scaling everything to suit different resolutions. I wonder if the author of z player would give any tips on how to scrape the images.

I think if you could work out how to just display the embedded album art small and work out where on the screen it looks best, like in my photo first then perhaps work out how to make the background dynamic and have it linked to the artist name that's embedded in the mp3 tag so that the background changes to match the "now playing" artist. So for now could just manually download one image per artist and name it the same as the artist section of the tag thats embedded in the mp3 file, until some sort of automatic metadata organiser could be included. So you would have two different options "display albumart" and"use dynamic artist background"Hope I am not overcomplicating anything and believe me if I could code I would be more than happy to help. Cheers.

After looking at the Pandora API a little longer, the artwork provided is even worse than what's embedded, it's only 200x200 pixels. So that won't work for background images. I'm going to try and search for a better API provider to scrape the images.

I'd rather not have to manually include images, user provided or not, and have everything automatic.

Overall I like the idea, I just need a good reliable source of high quality images. That will be the key to success

Edit: found a service that looks VERY promising. It provides more info than I know what to do with. Anything else wanted with meta data? I'll try and come up with ideas myself, as I like having all the proper meta data as well, but if anybody else has thoughts I'd love to hear them.